The most expensive coffee in the world is collected in Indonesia from the scat of a small carnivore called a luwak and is commonly known as ?cat-poop coffee.? It costs $300 US a pound. As people who glorify coffee, who support a coffee shop on every corner, who have embraced coffee as the last socially acceptable addiction, this is a fact that we all have to come to grips with sooner or later.
We already know the price of luwak coffee. What we need to establish is its value, and where that value lies. Connoisseurship can be ruled out right off the top. The rationale behind luwak coffee is that the luwak, looking for sweet fruit, picks only the best and ripest coffee cherry, yielding the best beans. Some also argue that fermentation in the luwak?s digestive juices adds a layer of flavour that can?t be duplicated. True or not, it doesn?t fit North American tastes. Specialty coffee merchant Michael Beach, owner of Raven?s Brew Coffee in Ketchikan, Alaska, describes luwak coffee as ?baggy, musty, earthy and dirty, with no positive flavour characteristics.?
Others are more charitable. John Rotelli, broker and agent for L.J. Cooper Co. in Westchester, N.Y., which imports luwak coffee from an Indonesian source house, says ?it?s a good cup of coffee, no doubt about it. It would fit industry standards. But I never quite got the real feeling inside of what makes it special.?
You can?t discount comic relief, which is the reason most people buy it. Just the word alone is fun to say: loo-whack. Add to that the fact that anything to do with number 2 makes us giggle. In 1995, Atlanta-based specialty coffee merchant John Martinez served luwak coffee at the Ig Nobel awards (for ?individuals whose achievements cannot or should not be reproduced?) and was awarded a prize, in the nutrition category. To mark the occasion, he wrote an Ode to the Luwak, with the concluding couplet: ?For all gathered here this is the scoop/ We?re drinking coffee from your poop.?
The luwak jokes go on and on. At Raven?s Brew, Beach talks to every prospective luwak coffee customer to make sure they understand it?s ?a crappy cup of coffee.? For every quarter-pound order ($75 US), he throws in a free ?Good to the last dropping? T-shirt, with a cartoon luwak, standing on a table, blinking at a few coffee cherries. A hand holds a coffee cup under the luwak?s tail, a second hand reaches out to grab the tail and crank out a few more beans ? straight from the luwak into the cup. (For an animated version see www.ravensbrew.com.)
In reality, the gap between the luwak and the coffee cup is much bigger. And it?s there, I?d argue, in the unusual contract between coffee-drinking humanity and a small, timid, fruit-loving carnivore, that we find the true value of luwak coffee. Luwak is a Malay name for palm civet, also called musang, or toddy cat, because it likes to drink palm juice, or ?toddy.?
The Latin name is Paradoxurus hermaphroditus. This is not a joke.
The paradox is a tail that looks like it?s prehensile, but isn?t, although it can be slightly coiled at will. ?Hermaphroditus? says nothing about the palm civet?s anatomy, but speaks volumes on the difficulty of sexing carnivores. Anyone who has ever had to rename a kitten can empathize.
Palm civets weigh between three and 10 pounds (1.5 to 4.5 kilos) and range from 17 to 28 inches (432 to 710 mm) in head and body length, with a 16 to 25 inch (406 to 660 mm) tail. They have a handsome coat pattern of longitudinal stripes on the back and spots on the shoulders, sides and thighs, and sometimes at the base of the tail. In the jungle, they bed down in vines in the canopy, or failing that, a hole in a tree. Around people, they will live in thatched roofs and in dry drain tiles and pipes. Palm civets gravitate toward human habitations because we attract rats and mice. Their preferred food is fruit, which has, over time, given them teeth less specialized for eating meat than most viverrids, the family of carnivores to which they, like mongooses and genets, belong.
There?s no need to tie a goat in a pit to catch a luwak. A bit of fruit and some coconut biscuits will do nicely. That?s what the authors of a November 1995 Journal of Mammalogy article used to capture the three palm civets they put radio collars on and studied in Royal Chitwan National Park in Nepal.
In the park, eight species of cat, including tigers, are potential predators of palm civets. As an evasive strategy, they have become completely nocturnal. The civets in the study never came out before dark and always found shelter before dawn. They were busier on darker nights. None of the palm civets left their resting trees on four nights with full moons. To fully grasp luwak coffee, imagine a jungle night so dark that only the rustling sound from the top of the coffee trees tells us that luwaks are feeding.
Even though they?re eating the crop, they?re not considered pests, but ?welcome members of the work force,? according to the Friends of the National Zoo?s Web site (www.fonz.org/zoogooer/ zg1996/luwak.htm).
By eating the cherry, they clean away the fruity pulp that makes up 80 per cent of the cherry?s weight and deliver the bean, already processed, ready for washing, drying and roasting. We grow the coffee, they pick it, process it and go to sleep. Without in any way disturbing them, we gather the beans from their scat and voila: something you can sell in Ketchikan for $75 a quarter pound.
Search as I do, I can think of no more equitable cross-species contract in the world of food production. It?s nothing short of heart-warming. This does not mean that I?m going to be sending away for a quarter pound of luwak coffee. I don?t want to see a luwak coffee craze any more than Miami Herald humour columnist Dave Barry does, although for different reasons. When a reader sent Barry a press release for a luwak coffee tasting he thought, at first, that it was ?a clever hoax designed to ridicule the coffee craze,? but found that ?tragically, it is not.?
As a person ?with a genuine medical need for coffee,? Barry was already frustrated at being forced to wait in behind people ?who apparently view it as some kind of recreational activity,? and order fancy hybrid coffees. ?I bet that when serious heroin addicts go to purchase their heroin, they do not tolerate waiting in line while some dilettante in front of them orders a hazelnut smack-a-cino with cinnamon sprinkles,? he wrote.
?One of these days, the people in front of me at the airport coffee place are going to be ordering decaf poopacino. I?m thinking of switching to heroin.?
This will never happen. Heroin is way more expensive than coffee and harder to buy in airports. Besides, there isn?t enough luwak coffee in the world to supply an airport coffee bar for a week. Widespread luwak coffee drinking could mean one of only two things: It wasn?t really luwak coffee. And as Barry asks: ?What kind of world is this when you worry that people might be ripping you off by selling you coffee that was not pooped out by a weasel?? Or it would mean that someone had figured out a way to increase production by making life harder for luwaks, perhaps by sentencing them to penal servitude in tiny concentration camps, as if they were so many laying hens.
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